Elementary, my dear pepperoni-face, or, What I Ate: Element Pizzeria

These eggplant chips were as much crispy fried flour crust as sliver-sliced vegetable and therefore a sneaky way to confuse eggplant-haters.

I rarely order pepperoni on a pizza because I'm more of a sausage man (insert joke here), especially when the sausage is produced in-house (second insert).

But Element's wildly spicy version is one I'll come back for. It's heated-up with chili flakes and lightly cooled-off with fresh mozzarella, but neither of those second and tertiary fiddles gets in the way of the spicy star: a proliferation of bacony pepperoni.

Note: this kind of pepperoni is known in the industry as collagen-cased, meaning it's sliced with the casing still on--meaning as the pizza bakes, the casing strips shrink, and this causes the meat discs to "cup-up".